GERMANY’S ROLE in the Nato mission to Afghanistan continues to unravel amid controversial new revelations about an air strike in September that killed up to 74 civilians.
Four months on, it has emerged that an elite German commando unit was involved in the September 4th bombing of two petrol tankers hijacked by the Taliban near Kunduz – an air strike that left about 140 people dead.
Defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has come under pressure for defending the bombing as justified despite an independent Red Cross report describing the military strike as a “human rights violation”.
As Germany’s bloodiest military incident since the second World War, the bombing was controversial from the start.
After the strike, Berlin justified its actions claiming that only Taliban members had been killed. Following a Nato investigation, however, the defence ministry admitted the bombing was neither justified nor in keeping with Nato procedures. The full Nato report into the incident remains classified.
The Red Cross report named 74 civilians whom it said were killed in the bombing, including children as young as eight years old.
The report, leaked to Stern magazine, concluded that the bombing “was not in keeping with international law”. It was delivered to the defence ministry on November 6th.Hours later Mr zu Guttenberg defended the mission in public as “militarily justified”.
Last week he revised his position after his ministry admitted it had withheld from him crucial reports on the bombing that admitted a high civilian death toll.
Putting a new spin entirely on the bombing are claims in yesterday’s Bild newspaper that German commandos were in close contact with the German colonel who ordered the strike.
For years it has been common knowledge that the elite soldiers have been deployed in Afghanistan, though Berlin declines to discuss their precise role.
According to the Bild report, the commandos from the KSK unit had contact with Afghan informers who confirmed the presence of four known Taliban leaders near the tankers.
Targeting Taliban leaders using intelligence is a long way from how Berlin sold its Afghan mission to a sceptical German public, as one of reconstruction and stabilisation.
Any KSK involvement could undermine, too, the justification to date for the air strike: a preventative measure to stop the tankers being turned into rolling bombs.
Considering that the two tankers’ tyres were stuck in river beds, the Red Cross dismissed the rolling bomb theory in its report as “unlikely”.